Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.
With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.
In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.
I don't expect an overnight change of all desktops to what the US Military used to call B3 level security. And even that would not stop users from shooting themselves into the foot.
Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale.
By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world.
Many scientists will have to contribute to the solution of the great problem; they will have to follow up and measure all those phenomena in which the atomic structure is directly expressed.
Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, a...
The cosmical importance of this conclusion is profound and the possibilities it opens for the future very remarkable, greater in fact than any suggested before by science in the whole history of the human race.
Projecting a persuasive image of a desirable and practical future is extremely important to high morale, to dynamism, to consensus, and in general to help the wheels of society turn smoothly.
As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject.
If, on occasion, the knowledge brought by science leads to an unhappy end, this is not to the discredit of science but is rather an indication of an imperfect ability to use wisely the gifts placed within our hands.
Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.
The CIA now assesses that four nations - Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France - have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.
North Korea not only wants unification, it absolutely has to have unification. That's really the only way this state can feel secure.
Where I grew up in the North-east, the community there, and the way people relate to one another, goes very deep. But I don't define myself as a Northerner in that I don't live in the North.
Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.
The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.
Throughout my many years of service to the people of North Carolina, I have always tried to treat people from all viewpoints with respect.
Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.
